IT Minor-Amber.

After taking the power searching class, there are five new tips and tricks that I learned to help me become more Google efficient.

1.) The Ctrl-F function.

This tool was designed to help your find certain text in a very long document. This function is extremely useful when I am doing homework or my EAST project. I have to deal with a lot of documents everyday and this tool will help me in finding key information quicker.

2.) OR and Quotes in a Google search.

These operators make searching so much easier. I can use quotes to match an exact phrase, which will be helpful whenever I do not remember a song title or book title, but I remember a line that was used. The OR operator helps increase search results. This will be very useful when I need to do assignments and need help finding sources or information.

3.) Filetype

Filetype is used in the search engine to distinguish a certain type of file. This semester I am taking World Literature. While most of my readings are in the book or on the internet (usually very basic websites), I prefer to read a PDF format of the text–that way I can print it out or mark it up with a Google Chrome extension. This function makes it easier for me to find PDF formats, or any other files that I may need.

4.) Search by Image

I LOVE THIS TOOL! This is absolutely AMAZING!!! There are so many ways that I can use this tool. When I am thinking about putting an image on my website and I want to caption it with information–or just want to know more information about the image– I can look up the image by dragging it over to the Google Image search engine and it will give me information about that image and information related to it.

5.) Checking Credibility with the Web Address

During the fifth session of the class, it talked about credibility and how to read a web address to help see if the site is credible. They gave us an example on how to read it by looking at the directory and seeing what document it is pointing to. This will be very useful when doing research–academic or professional–to establish credibility with whatever you are writing about.

This course was very beneficial for me. I learned a lot during it and I hope to only grow my knowledge of Google searching.